Course scheduling complicated by various factors

Friday’s editorial, “Classes should stick to the right times” (Jan. 20), naturally presented the problem from the student viewpoint and focused on student inconvenience and difficulty when constructing a course schedule. However, this is an important issue that has wider ramifications and alternative perspectives.

Any large class meeting only Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday allows that faculty instructor to have a four-day weekend. Moreover, these inefficient schedules cost the University because more classrooms are required. This practice is rumored to be long-standing and has apparently never been studied. I have been told that for many years, large humanities classes having senior faculty lecturers are seldom scheduled on Fridays or on Mondays. Faculty prosper but students suffer from such schedules.

To enable more flexible course schedules, classes could be scheduled at 8 a.m. or on a Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday calendar, as they were many years ago. Such an efficient schedule would, however, be a curse to most students.

James P. Collman

Professor Emeritus of Chemistry

Yes, it actually was plagiarism

I am writing in response to Michael Bax’s letter (“Was it actually plagiarism?”, Jan. 20). As a representative member of the Coalition for Justice in the Middle East, I would like to say that Bax’s claim that our organization only wished to dramatize the “dodgy dossier” scandal merely indicates that Bax probably either did not attend the lecture or did not pay close enough attention to the lecture to realize the intensity of the issue.

As students representing one of the most respectable and prestigious academic institutions in the world, I think we should be more aware of the many forms of plagiarism in the academic (and governmental) arena and of the ethical implications of trying to find loopholes that might allow us to represent other peoples’ work as ours.

When 19 paragraphs of the British Intelligence report, which was used as justification for the war in Iraq, are copied and pasted directly from Ibrahim Al-Marashi’s article without any attribution to his work, then that is in fact plagiarism. The British government even acknowledged its foul play by formally apologizing to Al-Marashi.

Furthermore, certain words from Al-Marashi’s article were altered to make an argument that Al-Marashi did not intend to make. An example of this misinformation was the blatant replacement of the term “opposition groups” to “terrorist organizations.” It is also important to note that Al-Marashi’s doctoral thesis was not written to describe the contemporary time period in Iraq, but rather was an account describing Iraq in 1990.

As for Bax’s claim that our organization is “agenda-driven,” I would like to clarify that our only “agenda” is to promote awareness and dialogue about issues pertaining to the Middle East on campus. At a time when there has been an immense focus on the problems the Middle East faces, I believe that it is our duty to educate the community and advocate for justice and human rights in that region.

Tala Al-Ramahi

Junior, Economics